Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/521

 TIBERIUS GRACCHUS. 513 them was for the most part due to ambitious feelings, and to the friends and reasoners who urged on Tiberius, and, as it was, it never amounted to any thing that might not have been remedied, or that was really bad. Nor can I think that Tiberius would ever have met with his mis- fortunes, if Scipio had been concerned in dealing with his measures ; but he was away fighting at Numantia, when Tiberius, upon the following occasion, first came forward as a legislator. Of the land which the Romans gained by conquest from their neighbors, part they sold publicly, and turned the remainder into common ; this common land they as- signed to such of the citizens as were poor and indigent, for which they were to pay only a small acknowledgment into the public treasury. But when the wealthy men began to offer larger rents, and drive the poorer people out, it was enacted by law, that no person whatever should enjoy more than five hundred acres of ground. This act for some time checked the avarice of the richer, and was of great assistance to the poorer people, who re- tained under it their respective proportions of ground, as they had been formerly rented by them. Afterwards the rich men of the neighborhood contrived to get these lands again into their possession, under other people's names, and at last would not stick to claim most of them publicly in their own. The poor, who were thus deprived of their farms, were no longer either ready, as they had formerly been, to serve in war, or careful in the education of their children ; insomuch that in a short time there were comparatively few freemen remaining in all Italy, which swarmed with workhouses full of foreign-born slaves. These the rich men employed in cultivating their ground, of which they dispossessed the citizens. Caius Laalius, the intimate friend of Scipio, undertook to reform this abuse; but meeting with opposition from men of vol. rv. 33